Novice teachers require support in learning to attend and respond to students’ thinking as expert teachers do. Video clubs in which groups of teachers respond to videos of one another’s classrooms can help. Van Es and Sherin describe how a video club helped teachers make space for student thinking to emerge, probe students’ understanding, and learn from their students while teaching.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. WISE Guys & Gals (WGG) is an Informal STEM program that engages early adolescents (middle school age youth) in innovative and engaging blended (on-line and hands-on) STEM based engineering challenges. WISEngineering, the open source online learning environment, that supports WGG, connects and blends the strengths of virtual design and physical modeling while also facilitating youth collaboration and collection of data for research.
Naturalists act as our link between scientific knowledge and the public’s understanding of natural history and conservation efforts. In order for them to succeed, they need access to reference materials as well as up-to-date information (Mankin, Warner, & Anderson, 1999). Incorporating mobile technology (i.e. tablets) into naturalists’ endeavors in natural history and environmental education can be used as supportive and educational tools. My project investigated how newly trained naturalists used tablet technology while leading groups of children on nature hikes. I investigated naturalists’
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Abuin Marishka Radzewich St. ClairKristy Daniel (Halverson)
Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG), a research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts specializing in program evaluation, has been conducting external evaluation of ZOOM for WGBH-TV Boston since 1998. GRG's Season VI evaluation comprised a pilot test to investigate the effectiveness of the new online ZOOMSCITM TRAINING: LEARN TO LEAD SCIENCE ACTIVITIES (ZOOMsci Training), a self-directed, online tutorial designed to help afterschool educators learn how to lead hands-on science activities with kids ages 8 to 11. The goal of the training is to motivate leaders, help them develop science-teaching
The Space Science Institute is developing an astronomy educational social game for the Facebook platform. The game uses the "sporadic play" model popular with many Facebook games, in which players take only a few actions at a time, then return to explore the results. Here players will create their own stars and planetary systems that evolve over time at a rate of a million years a minute. Players set systems in motion, revisiting the game over days or weeks to make new choices and alter strategies. The game is in effect an end-to-end solar system simulation, following a star from birth to death. As a result it encompasses a wide variety of core concepts in astronomy, including galactic structure, stellar evolution and lifecycles, planetary formation and evolution, and habitability and "habitable zones." The accompanying research program will examine the effectiveness of this type of game in informal education, and the effects of the social network on meeting the education goals, including viral spread, cooperative play, and discussions about the game and its underlying content in associated online forums.
This full scale research and development collaborative project between Smith College and Springfield Technical Community College improves technical literacy for children in the area of engineering education through the Through My Window learning environment. The instructional design of the learning environment results from the application of innovative educational approaches based on research in the learning sciences—Egan's Imaginative Education (IE) and Knowledge Building (KB). The project provides idea-centered engineering curriculum that facilitates deep learning of engineering concepts through the use of developmentally appropriate narrative and interactive multimedia via interactive forums and blogs, young adult novels (audio and text with English and Spanish versions), eight extensive tie-in activities, an offline teachers’ curriculum guide, and social network connections and electronic portfolios. Targeting traditionally underrepresented groups in engineering—especially girls—the overarching goals of the project are improving attitudes toward engineering; providing a deeper understanding of what engineering is about; supporting the development of specific engineering skills; and increasing interest in engineering careers. The project will address the following research questions: What is the quality of the knowledge building discourse? Does it get better over time? Will students, given the opportunity, extend the discourse to new areas? What scaffolding does the learning environment need to support novice participants in this discourse? Does the use of narrative influence participation in knowledge building? Are certain types of narratives more effective in influencing participation in knowledge building? Evaluative feedback for usability, value effectiveness, and ease of implementation from informal educators and leaders from the Connecticut After School Network CTASN) will be included. The evaluation will include documentation on the impact of narrative and multimedia tools in the area of engineering education. Currently, there is very little research regarding children and young teen engagement in engineering education activities using narrative as a structure to facilitate learning engineering concepts and principles. The research and activities developed from this proposed project contributes to the field of Informal Science and Engineering Education. The results from this project could impact upper elementary and middle-school aged children and members from underrepresented communities and girls in a positive way.
Kinetic City After School is a project supported by a prior NSF award that has produced over 80 activities in areas typical of after school activities such as computer games/simulations, hands-on activities, active play, and art and writing. This pathways project, KC Empower, will redesign and test five activities of the 80 activities currently developed by Kinetic City using a new approach to increase the representation of children and youth with disabilities in informal science settings. The project will test how universal design principles can be integrated with new technologies, not available when most after school STEM content was created, to address the needs of students with disabilities. The technologies used in the redesign include advanced mobile platforms and applications; search engines that sift through audio, image and video files; gaming input devices that respond to body movements; and information restructuring that allows multiple representations of content. The project will test how universal design guidelines will work with new technologies, in the short-term providing hands-on activities more accessible to students with disabilities, while increasing access for all students. The project is expected to lead to a full scale development project that will update all modules in Kinetic City After School. The target audience is 3rd - 5th grade students. The hypothesis of the project is that designing for disability can strengthen activities designed to increase science knowledge. Rather than making accommodations for persons with disabilities, it is the environment and design that are disabled, and it is better educational practice to rethink the activity from the point of view of all learners, including those with disabilities. Thus the use of universal design will address how best to present material for all users while influenced by the challenges presented by disabled users. The project includes the Coalition for Science After School, the Center for Applied Special Technology and the Afterschool Alliance.
The University of California, Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC), UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES), ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (ECHO), UC Berkeley Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), and the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) will study how 3-D visualizations can most effectively be used to improve general public understanding of freshwater lake ecosystems and Earth science processes through the use of immersive three-dimensional (3-D) visualizations of lake and watershed processes, supplemented by tabletop science activity stations. Two iconic lakes will be the focus of this study: Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, and Lake Champlain in Vermont and New York, with products readily transferable to other freshwater systems and education venues. The PI will aggregate and share knowledge about how to effectively utilize 3-D technologies and scientific data to support learning from immersive 3-D visualizations, and how other hands-on materials can be combined to most effectively support visitor learning about physical, biological and geochemical processes and systems. The project will be structured to iteratively test, design, and implement 3-D visualizations in both concurrent and staggered development. The public will be engaged in the science behind water quality and ecosystem health; lake formation; lake foodwebs; weather and climate; and the role and impact of people on the ecosystem. A suite of publicly available learning resources will be designed and developed on freshwater ecosystems, including immersive 3-D visualizations; portable science stations with multimedia; a facilitator's guide for docent training; and a Developer's Manual to allow future informal science education venues. Project partners are organized into five teams: 1) Content Preparation and Review: prepare and author content including writing of storyboards, narratives, and activities; 2) 3-D Scientific Visualizations: create visualization products using spatial data; 3) Science Station: plan, design, and produce hands-on materials; 4) Website and Multimedia: produce a dissemination strategy for professional and public audiences; 4) Evaluation: conduct front-end, formative, and summative evaluation of both the 3-D visualizations and science activity stations. The summative evaluation will utilize a mixed methods approach, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and will include focus groups, semi-structured interviews, web surveys, and in-depth interviews. Leveraging 3-D tools, high-quality visual displays, hands-on activities, and multimedia resources, university-based scientists will work collaboratively with informal science education professionals to extend the project's reach and impact to an audience of 400,000 visitors, including families, youth, school field trip groups, and tourists. The project will implement, evaluate, and disseminate knowledge of how 3-D visualizations and technologies can be designed and configured to effectively support visitor engagement and learning about physical, biological and geochemical processes and systems, and will evaluate how these technologies can be transferred more broadly to other informal science venues and schools for future career and workforce development in these critical STEM areas.
Between the Waters is a website and interactive virtual tour that will showcase the culture and history of Hobcaw Barony, a 17,500 acre historic site in Georgetown, South Carolina, which is arguably the setting for a greater confluence of humanities themes than any other in the state. Using the website’s artifacts, structures and landmarks as storytelling cues, Between the Waters will connect material culture to the lives of those who inhabited Hobcaw and interpret their history for the general public. The non-linear navigation of Between the Waters will encourage inquiry, analysis and deductive reasoning, giving visitors the skills and incentive to explore and reflect upon the multifaceted story of Hobcaw Barony, how it has helped to shape the American present and its implications for the future of South Carolina and the country.
This evaluation reports on the Mission: Solar System project, a 2-year project funded by NASA. The goal of the Mission: Solar System was to create a collection of resources that integrates digital media with hands-on science and engineering activities to support kids’ exploration in formal and informal education settings. Our goal in creating the resources were: For youth: (1) Provide opportunities to use science, technology, engineering, and math to solve challenges related to exploring our solar system, (2) Build and hone critical thinking, problem-solving, and design process skills, (3)
It is critical that we increase public knowledge and understanding of science and technology issues through formal and informal learning for the United States to maintain its competitive edge in today's global economy. Since most Americans learn about science outside of school, we must take advantage of opportunities to present chemistry content on television, the Internet, in museums, and in other informal educational settings. In May 2010, the National Academies' Chemical Sciences Roundtable held a workshop to examine how the public obtains scientific information informally and to discuss
Rockman et al (REA), a San Francisco-based research and evaluation firm, conducted the external evaluation for Youth Radio's DO IT! program, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. Building upon Youth Radio's previous Science and Technology Program, the DO IT! initiative consisted of three primary components that promoted STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning by training underserved youth in cutting-edge digital technologies: (1) Brains and Beakers: Young people hosted a line-up of investigators and inventors for demo-dialogues at Youth Radio's studios
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Rockman et al | Youth RadioKristin BassJulia Hazer